I think it might be because some folks from the older generation have a sense of entitlement...mostly because they often lived through a glorious period that en masse has been beneficial to them...They expected flying cars, etc...So, now, this time they'll get their AI servants...So, its sort of an expectation (for some from this older generation) that the world will keep giving them lots of good (well, good for them!) things in life.

My sincere apologies if my comments are offensive to anyone (of any age group)...but i do agree that I'm seeing way more older people in support of the AI evolution, and many many more younger people fearing it. My age is far closer to the older generation, but lots of times, i'm feeling what i see lots of younger folks feeling: fear.

>and fervently pushed by people over 55.

Source? I think you're conflating "pushed by CEOs" (which might lean on the older side) with "pushed by people over 55".

> fervently pushed by people over 55.

It is?

I know very few people in that age group who are excited by this stuff.

My own conspiracy theory is that AI, and the increasingly authoritarian government swings, are the Boomer generation's last shot at freezing the world in time and ensuring our world is shaped to their vision long after they're all gone. The thing that generation fears the most is that we're all going to just move on from them when they're dead, and finally progress past this "1970-2020" economic/cultural stasis that we've been stuck in for basically my entire life.

This is pretty wrong. There are a lot of people who _hate it_, but it is still a minority. And older people dislike it more than younger people.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/2/27/public-opinio...

Feelings on it are quite mixed, but people who hate it and boosters are both incredibly loud about it.

It’s also the one tech that has been picked up by porn but not video games.

I’m kinda surprised by that. Gaming and porn were the ones that spearheaded tech uptake.

Oh don't you know? The young people don't know how to use technology any more. They've never had computers they control. The new hires and the nearly retired have the same computer skils.

Locked down OS iPad kids don't know how to use computers because the manufactures and their parents wouldn't let them.

The Matrix' 1999 "peak of human civilization" wasn't wrong, the world is moving to a society built by a small number of wizards owned by billionaires.

Follow the money.

People over 55 are most concerned about one thing: retirement. Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for. In the US, you do this by holding assets that yield returns on your investment. Over the last half-century, we've made returning that yield the main objective of publicly-traded corporations to the complete exclusion of everything else.

People like Schmidt were hired by boards, who were elected by shareholders, with the hope that they'd increase returns. The biggest shareholders in most American companies are pension and retirement funds, followed by funds that are not necessarily retirement funds but are often used by individuals to back IRAs and 401(k)s.

When the executives of Schmidt's generation were hired, they were incentivized with stock options instead of cash. Their compensation was directly tied to how much money was returned to shareholders.

When you maximize a return to a shareholder, you do that by minimizing the costs of the inputs to the business. One of those costs is labor. Payroll, benefits, the costs of the office space people work in, etc.

GenAI offers shareholders - which can be seen as synonymous with people who are approaching retirement or who are retirees - a promise of massively reducing labor costs. In the minds of a lot of institutional investors, they could have companies where the same amount of value is created with only c-suite and executive-level employees working with teams of AI agents that, over time, will become cheaper and cheaper. What was once hundreds or thousands of employees is now a few dozen.

Now, where does this leave young and middle-aged people? In a place where they have a wildly uncertain future. But that's not the retiree's problem. They want the villa on the golf course in Florida, and by the time you have real social problems resulting from a population with no hope for the future, the retirees will be dead or too old to care.

Schmidt's cohort, for their part, have enough money to deal with those problems in the near to mid-term. Or, at least, they think they do.

EDIT:

Love getting downvoted for what is, essentially, a factual statement.

This is not even close to the reality on the ground. But America’s enemies would be smacking their lips and rubbing their hands together imagining a regressive youth.